A Roman Empire Second Wind Sweeps Montreal

The Torlonia Collection of ancient Roman sculpture ends its triumphant North American tour at the city’s Museum of Fine Arts.

T wo weeks ago, I was looking at Mount Rushmore, our epic, go-big-or-go-home brand of American civic sculpture. Two thousand years ago, what were the Romans doing with sculpture?

Emperors and their wives, visionaries and connivers, weird cult sculptures, fancy tombs, kinky nudes, gods, goddesses, and a majestic goat, that’s what, as we learn at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in The Torlonia Collection: Masterpieces of Roman Sculpture. Through nearly 60 sculptures between around 300 b.c. and a.d. 200, we travel to the world of Veni, Vidi, Vici.

Torlonia starts with a supersized, turbocharged strigilated sarcophagus from between a.d. 260 and 270, with a lion fit for an MGM movie on each side. One lion strides over a ram, the other over an antelope, and each one has a brave attendant giving him a wash with a strigil, a curved metal tool used to scrape cleansing oil from an athlete. Strigilation is made of cascading, undulating, S-shaped curves that converge at the center, suggesting the rhythmic ups and downs of life. Including a strigil in the sculpture with strigilation was a nice touch. I like shows that begin with the wow factor. And Torlonia keeps the magic going.

At the center of the next gallery is the one and only Roman bronze in the Torlonia collection. It’s thought to depict Germanicus and dates to the first century a.d., so it’s around his lifetime. Germanicus, who died in a.d. 19, was Tiberius’s nephew, Augustus’s grand-nephew, and a dashing, winning general compared in Roman times to Alexander the Great. He was Caligula’s father and Nero’s grandfather, so there must have been a few bad figs in the gene pool. The bronze is life-sized, compelling, and rare since nearly all Greek and Roman bronze sculptures eventually went to the smelter. Beauty and authority aside, we learn two crucial things. We’re introduced to the Torlonia family of collectors and to the sticky issue of restoration.

Who are these Torlonias? In the late 1790s, the family, originally French and bankers to Pope Pius VI and the Bonaparte family, started its phenomenal collection by buying the estate of Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, a restorer of Roman antiquities. Cavaceppi’s art might have been first intended to decorate family homes, but, over generations, ancient sculpture became a Torlonia passion. The collection of the nobleman Vincenzo Giustiniani, among Rome’s grandest collectors in the early 17th century, had been bouncing around until a Torlonia prince bought it in 1816.

The collection also grew through excavations on Torlonia land in the city and the countryside. The family commissioned a superb catalogue of the collection in 1884 with high-quality illustrations. The collection was known for top-notch restorations. They opened a museum, but it closed during World War II and never really reopened.

I reviewed the massive exhibition of the by then mysterious Torlonia sculptures, some 300 of them, in 2021 at the Capitoline in Rome. The show was fantastic, very, very big, and designed by David Chipperfield, so it sometimes felt like Aida. The Italian state may or may not buy the collection, and the family may or may not revive their museum. It’s in a very Italian state of intrigue and flux. This current tour is smaller, about 56 objects, and shown at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Kimbell in Fort Worth, and in Montreal. Three better spots are hard to find. It looked fantastic at all three. Being a New World proposition, the tour is more straightforward and without Italian bombast.

Another theme running through Torlonia is restoration. All the sculptures on view have been restored, which makes sense since all of them were battered and bruised from Rome’s unpretty fall, decline to a ruinous state, and frequent sackings. And sheer ignorance, centuries underground, and often ham-handed excavation don’t do marble any good. The ones in pieces were lucky. Thousands were ground for their lime or repurposed for new buildings.

Following the template of Cavaceppi and Giustiniani, Torlonia collectors restored the fragmented sculptures they found to make them look almost new. Guiding them as well were the teachings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the curator-scholar who in the 1760s and ’70s created a purist approach to the display of antiquities, advising collectors to chase the heroic or noble ideal and make them whole, even if that meant mixing and matching ancient pieces or, in the case of Resting Goat, life-sized and from the first century a.d., making an altogether new head.

Resting Goat is a showstopper in part because of the sensitive carving of its torso, legs, and hooves and in part because of the head, attributed to Bernini, Rome superstar sculptor and architect. Of course, the head’s splendid and he now looks like the Clark Gable of goats. Every object in the show has, as part of its label, a graphic showing what’s original and what’s been added. Sometimes the additions are bits here and there, a base, a shoulder, a tunic, or a nose. The Torlonia nose-job guy must have worked overtime. Sometimes, and this is the case in many of the portrait sculptures, the imperial heads date to the emperors they depict but the torsos are matched, often in the 18th or 19th centuries. In ancient times, most of a sculpture might be made in, say, Asia Minor — cheap labor — and sent to Rome for the buyer’s bespoke touches, sculpted by someone else in a different brand of marble.

It does make for odd moments. The restorer of Germanicus knew little about ancient bronzes. He’d seen life-sized marbles, and they had draped stumps by the figure’s side for extra support. Bronze, inherently stronger, doesn’t need this, but Germanicus got it anyway. Some of the marbles look overcleaned — in the 1700s or 1800s, they probably got their premium add-on car wash, undercarriage scrub, hot-wax sealant, spot-free rinse, and a shine. Not the end of the world. Most Roman marbles were painted anyway and further jazzed with bronze ornaments such as diadems and spears.

A big gallery on death and remembrance is very moving. The marquee work is the sarcophagus with the two heads from other sculptures. Its lid is displayed separately from the base because together the two would rise eight feet. Separated, we can look at details of each. It’s from the late 100s a.d., and, like many grand sarcophagi, it displays the Twelve Labors of Hercules since life’s a bitch, Hercules did the heavy lifting, atoned for sins, and died an immortal god. Romans loved their ancestors and worshipped at their tombs. The ones for the very rich lined the roads just outside the city walls. This very Roman death row was a competition among families to moulder in the biggest and best sarcophagi.

Very striking, too, are sculpture portraits, starting with old men who’ve lived life and have the wrinkles, sags, and sunken cheeks to show it. They’ve got the look of virtue and experience. The prototype is the late third century b.c. Euthydemus of Bactria — he wears a bowler, known as a “kausia” hat in his day, and looks like late-stage Wallace Beery. Then there are the imperials, displayed against black walls in a well-done space where larger-than-life busts deliver the look of power and conquest as Romans by the millions saw it.

Who knows whether the Roman rulers looked like this. We do know that for Augustus, Hadrian, Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, Antoninus Pius, and Septimius Severus, these likenesses, in sculpture and coins, were made in the hundreds of thousands and were ubiquitous, in shops, windows, eaves, porches, home altars, and stadiums. At the museum, Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, who seized power in 27 b.c., sits in the middle of the gallery, the hub, on a throne. He’s nude but for drapery, with his left arm raised, a pose taken from a Greek sculpture of Zeus at Olympia. He’s forever young. The imperial face alone made Romans think twice before doing wrong.

Wall panels cover Roman strategies for succession — who murdered whom and musical chairs sum that up — as well as dynastic continuity, the soft power of imperial women, and the downfall, the end of the Augustan era. Busts are arranged in groups on platforms along the walls. They look not too many steps from alive. Sculptures of high-end Roman women have hairdos à la mode. We don’t know whether these are royals, since imperial women didn’t get likenesses on coins or in public squares with inscriptions. Emperors have Roman curls. Two sculptures of Marcus Aurelius, one young, one older, suggest the weight of rule. Lucius Verus and Septimius Severus have the hard look of churls.

The last galleries, loosely called Fellini’s Rome, draw from Torlonia sculptures that reflect themes in Satyricon, a Federico Fellini movie from 1969. Based on a book by the Roman satirist Petronius, the movie concerns everyday life in Nero’s Rome, naughty and nice, with gods and goddesses, plebes and the well-heeled, in an imperial mélange that’s religious as well as social and economic. It’s an impressive end to the show, like the exploding shapes of rapid fireworks.

Venus, Cupid, Minerva, and Mercury are among the divinities. A group of sculptures of children look less like little men and women and more like budding psychopaths. The Torlonia Nile, from the late first century a.d., is there, a splendid colored marble that’s a reclining personification of the river, with his cornucopia and mop of tangled, wet hair, a buxom sphinx by his hand and a baby crocodile at his feet. The bizarre Statuette of Artemis Ephesia, a little later, is steps away. Wild beasts project from her dress, as do more than a dozen breasts. Her head and hands are dark marble. Artemis, an ancient goddess of animals, nature, and fecundity, was at the fringe of mainstream religion but honored in Ephesus in what’s now western Turkey. A relief of Mithraic sacrifice of a bull is from the same time. Mithras is a Persian god whose cult was secretly worshipped in Rome, as was Christianity in the same era. Zodiac signs, a multistep initiation practice, bull’s blood, a snake, a dog, and ears of corn sprouting from animal backsides make for a bundle of kink.

Rome was a mad, mad, mad world that embraced more of humanity than any empire. A microcosm is The Portus Relief, from around a.d. 200, a 4-foot-wide relief sculpture depicting the visual commotion in a day in the life of Portus, imperial Rome’s main port. It was excavated on Torlonia land in 1864. A small boat in the left-hand corner guides a ship into harbor. The ship is packed with goods, its sails decorated with images of Romulus and Remus suckling a wolf. Three onboard figures sacrifice at an altar in thanks for a safe journey. Gods dot the scene: Bacchus, the god of wine, likely part of the cargo; Neptune, god of the sea; and heavenly personifications of Rome. A crew on the right unloads a docked ship. Behind Neptune is a triumphal arch topped by a chariot pulled by elephants. An apotropaic eye — “apotropaios” is a Greek word that means “averting evil” — watches the sailors. Sculpted horizontal swirls on the bottom suggest the sea. It’s quite a scene and displayed in low light, since it still has some of its original color.

The exhibition ends with The Hestia Giustiniani from the first half of the second century a.d., a Roman copy of a fifth-century Greek sculpture. The folds in the female figure’s dress are like flutes on a column — an irony, since Romans would have seen this style as old-fashioned. But it’s probably not Hestia, the Greek goddess of hearth and home, but a vestal virgin, consecrated to the Roman goddess Vesta. She’s displayed in all her purity and prudishness in front of a wall mural from a Panini painting that shows Roman frolics among the ruins circa 1750.

Brandishing Fellini at the end was smart, too, and in keeping with the museum’s tradition for evocative, lyrical presentations of its art. Some of the best exhibitions I’ve ever seen have been at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. A French place, it always has the buzz of drama and romance. “Frisson” isn’t a French word for nothing. Montreal is one of my favorite places, too, so French and stylish and Old World and yet less than four hours in easy driving from ye olde Arlington in the Vermont wilderness. The Torlonia Foundation sent the collection on the road to raise awareness. They certainly got it through this splendid tour.